Sleep: The Subtle Art of Time Travel?

Lai

Lai

Temporal Novice
Sleeping can technically be considered as a form of time travel because it lets you "skip" through time, at least from your point of view.

So how can you use this as a tool to travel time? There's no way you can sleep for an year or something like that, right? (ehem sleeping beauty, I'm looking at you)

Your body will naturally wake up and won't fall asleep so easily after you get the amount sleep you need. Even sleeping pills can't help because too much of it will cause a person to overdose.

Now, are you thinking about freezing your body or inducing a coma upon yourself?:

Well, there is actually a technology called crypto preservation which lets you freeze your body, but it is very damaging and irreversible with current technology.

As for the coma, doctors can actually induce a coma-like state for therapeutic reasons by administering central nervous system depressant drugs. These comas are only maintained for a few days or weeks and only done for medical reasons, meaning that you can't really travel time this way.

Either way, it is interesting to see how we can travel time by the use of sleep or sleep like states. Even death is sleep:

"Sleep is the brother of death"

"Sleep is a short death and death is a long sleep"

It resurrection were real, (not saying it isn't real. It is in religions including mine) we can travel time I guess :)
 
As I tell people on Chat Roulette recently...There's an easy way, and a hard way. Dreamfaring (not quite what you're talking about here but I'm going with it) is just one of many ways.

The Easy Way:
Just train yourself to lucid dream, and the once in control of the dream, further train yourself to break out and project your consciousness back to another point in spacetime completely. You can start down this path this with a familiar song or smell that's scheduled to trigger at a specific time of the morning (such as 3-4AM) when you know you'll be deep sleeping, thus "waking" you up while inside the dream. You then train yourself to move your avatar between different spaces, then into spaces you haven't been or possibly areas you want to revisit. Over time you just naturally go into your dreams with full control like it's a playstation & you select the game. It can check all the time travel boxes for most people and there's very little harm since you can't really hurt anything here while you're dreaming.

Most people find the "Just use your dreams, bro" answer to be dissatisfying, even though anyone can do it. All everyone wants to know is the hard way, which none of them can do so it's not like it matters if I were to give step by step instructions 😂

More in context of the OP though....I suppose in the same vein as sleeping to teleport several hours into the future, that blinking would do the trick too on a shorter timescale. I'm not certain of anyone that considers alcohol blackouts time displacement, but they too blink one moment and "wake up" dizzy later on. In a multiverse it would be totally natural to say "When you wake up you're not necessarily in the same universe you were in before you went to sleep" because things change around you & you're in superposition to the rest of the world until you wake.
 
Lai, good job thinking the problem through.

Sleeping or induced coma as a form of time travel has a huge draw back. You go to sleep, don't mentally or psychologically experience the time while asleep, and wake up sometime in the future. But your body has aged appropriate to the period of time you were asleep; both you and everything else on Earth have aged at the same rate.

On the other hand, relativistic time travel to the future isn't theoretical. It is experimentally verified every day. You just need to travel very fast with respect to the target location you want to arrive at and time, from your perspective, outside your vehicle will advance much more quickly than inside your vehicle. If you travel at some appreciable portion of the speed of light you can arrive in the same future as the sleeper but you won't have aged any more than the time you experienced inside your vehicle.

If you could leave Earth and travel at 94% the speed of light for a year (according to your personal clock that you carry with you) and return you would be 1 year older and Earth would be 3 years older. If you could get to 99.999999% the speed of light Earth would age 7071 years while you only age one year. That velocity is actually possible...if you're a proton. That's the velocity CERN can achieve in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). So it is theoretically possible to accelerate a massive object to that velocity assuming you have sufficient energy available. CERN needs an electric generation plant that can power 35,000 homes to get the needed energy. So a person and a vehicle is a bit of a "special" challenge - but not at all impossible - compared to a proton.
 
As the method of time traveling here focuses on transferring the personal perspective "into the future" by introducing an interval of unconsciousness in between, I wonder if it still counts as "time travel" if the person is fully aware of that amount of unconsciousness?
Do you really feel that you "wake up in the future" when you are fully aware that you have spent an amount of time in bed from last night till the morning?
I just feel that for this to fully work as a time-traveling method, the person going through it should not be aware of the time that passed, nor feel anything that could be the result of the unconscious time - e.g the body hasn't been aging (at least not perceivably), no morning headaches. In that sense, it sounds, to me, like a normal time travel now.
 
Back
Top